Zum letzten Mal: Yerma von Simon Stone │frei nach Federico García Lorca

In the organizer's words:

SHE and her husband John don't actually have any problems. SHE is in her mid-30s and a successful editor at a daily newspaper and lifestyle blogger. He is in his early 40s and brings home a lot of money as an entrepreneur. They have just bought a large apartment in an old building. Then SHE suddenly comes along with a wish that John would never have guessed she had. SHE wants a child! He has nothing against it either. So far, so good.

But from now on, all lightness is gone. SHE only bases her love life on her fertile days and demands that John also schedule his business trips around them. But SHE just won't get pregnant. He flees from the pressure and is absent more and more often. Her desire to have children, which develops into mania, also affects her relationship with her sister Mary, who has a child but is unable to build a relationship with him. Her mother Helen is no support for HER either, as she freely admits that she would rather have enjoyed her freedom than bring up her daughters. To make matters worse, SHE lets the whole world in on her mental suffering and unsuccessful attempts to get pregnant because SHE meticulously reports everything on her blog. SHE gets deeper and deeper into her obsession. SHE and John fall into a nightmare and can't find their way out.

"Yerma", this name means "the fallow" in Spanish. Writer and director Simon Stone (*1984) has brought the 1934 drama by Spanish author Federico García Lorca from the rural Andalusia of the 1930s into the big city milieu of today. Both depict the tragedy of the childless, unfulfilled woman. In Lorca's novel, Yerma is the wife of a farmer whose main task is to give birth to children, but who also ties her meaning of life and all her hopes for happiness to a baby. Simon Stone published his rewrite of "Yerma" in London in 2016 and staged it again at the Schaubühne in Berlin in 2021. The play has been running there with great success ever since. His Yerma represents a woman who is spoiled by success, who has never actually thought about having children, but who does not accept failure once she has set her mind to something. The play provides an impressive example of how quickly a fixed idea can turn into self-destructive fanaticism. With the other female characters in this drama, Simon Stone also takes the often idealized image of the mother off the pedestal and shows it in all its ambivalence.